First day at the Ottawa Linux Symposium

Ottawa Linux Symposium is back and NewsForge has some pretty darn good coverage of the event. You can check out part one below….

OTTAWA — The 8th annual Ottawa Linux Symposium (OLS) kicked off Wednesday in Ottawa, Canada at the Ottawa Congress Centre. Jonathan Corbet, co-founder of Linux Weekly News, opened the symposium with The Kernel Report, an update on the state of the kernel since last year.

Corbet started his talk with a brief recap of the Linux kernel development process. According to Corbet, Linux kernels are now on a two- to three-month release cycle. The current Linux kernel version is 2.6.17.6, with 2.6.17.7 expected shortly. All 2.6.x kernels are major releases, with 2.6.x.y kernels being bug-fix releases.

Corbet says that there will not be a 2.7 kernel tree for the foreseeable future, not until there is a major, earth-shattering change that will break everything — and thereby require an unstable kernel tree.

The major release cycle developers use now takes approximately 8 weeks. In week 0, new features are included in the kernel in what is termed the merge window. This is typically in the form of several thousand kernel patches. This process ends when Linus decides there has been enough and the merge window is decreed closed.

The kernel then goes into release candidate mode, with effort going into stabilization and bug-fixing. Release candidate (-rc) kernels are released periodically and by the theoretical 8th week (which usually is a bit later), a major release is released. Subsequently, all bug-fixes and patches to that kernel come in the form of 2.6.x.y version numbers…. Source: NewsForge